Terrapin Station

Reading comprehension assistance: "if something is understandable (to anyone), then you'd (personally) understand it. Since you needed that reading co...

With respect to other people, as I said, I wouldn't be comfortable making that decision for other people. Surely some people would want me to make tha...

Actually both of those would be situations where you're not understanding something. It's just that you're hinting at the idea that if something is un...

Re the sort of laissez-faire relativist that I am, by the way, including that I'm a truth-relativist, I wouldn't push the button, because I'd not be c...

Even if we're not strictly talking about a brain-in-a-vat scenario, with something like this: A utilitarian could easily believe that "no personal eff...

I'm not convinced that any one of those "x-ists must say" or "could not be committed to x-ism" claims work. For example, one could easily be a utilita...

It seems like either you didn't read what I wrote or you didn't understand it. I said, "I have no problem with there being different sorts of utility ...

Hence you not understanding my comments--which is what I said in the first place, but which you denied. I'm not saying anything about temporal or logi...

Reference points have no necessary connection to minds, persons, etc. Imagine that no people exist whatsoever. Everything that exists still has (at le...

As I explained a couple times, "from no reference point" is impossible.

I'm not following you at all. First, I don't buy that any experience (or anything in general for that matter) is invariant. I also don't know why it w...

Oh, I know it's impressive.

Re the conversation about idealism, I agree that idealists are not necessarily solipsists, but I do not agree that it's easy to make sense out of non-...

I don't believe that you're understanding me. Let's try it this way: We're talking about the shape of the stick from what reference point?

No, that's not at all what I found funny about your comment. What was hilarious about your comment was that it was at least phrased as if being presen...

Well, it's not as if I can just will it to make sense to me because it seems like a good distinction to you. I have no problem with there being differ...

I sure don't believe that.

Haha that you have no idea why your question would be funny.

Haha--I literally laughed out loud at that.

It doesn't really make sense to me because I think of practical and useful being two terms for more or less the same thing.

I'm pretty close to simply starting to say either "Hey moron" or "Hey liar" to you, because you seem completely incapable of learning, OR completely u...

I'd agreed on that one. Or maybe saying that we have no idea what a phrase like "the world" refers to.

For one, it's correlated with idleness. And that's one reason that boredom is far less common with adults. Adults are typically too busy to be bored.

Okay <shrugs> You can feel differently. It's not as if there are correct/incorrect answers about this sort of stuff. It's just a matter of how one fee...

Actually, the idea was that the vast majority of adults, they do enjoy subtleties etc. That just seems to be part of growing up. I wouldn't say it's u...

I don't see causing stress in others as good or bad in itself. Some things that cause stress in others are good in my opinion, some are bad, and some ...

It always seemed to me that it was mostly kids who got bored. I agree it seems to be a first world problem. And with kids it seems to be that they wan...

But this is just what I was talking about in my comment. The properties of everything extant are relative to the reference point we're talking about, ...

It's a "think about how ridiculous what you've done is" request where ideally I'm hoping you think about it and respond that you've seen the error of ...

What? There seems to be no argument for your claim there . . . well, or no argument beyond a composition/hasty generalization fallacy.

Start one? Sometimes it seems like all we're capable of talking about, in every friggin thread no matter what it was ostensibly about at the start, ar...

In one sense, a la personal identity, it's always me again, but in terms of (onto)logical identity (rather than personal identity), I'm different from...

I don't understand the idea there. What is useful to us in more than merely practical ways?

None. Especially because I see no boots.

A lot of your comments seem to be based on ideas that (a) there is some "natural order" which we can violate in some ways, and (b) for some reason, we...

There's nothing inherently wrong with cancer, either. A fortiori because there's nothing inherently wrong with anything. It's just a matter of what pe...

That notion doesn't seem any less theory-laden to me as the idea that we simply perceive objects. And I don't buy ideas such as unconscious inference ...

Yeah, man, let's continue to play stupid. That's some quality philosophizing.

That's correct but the sooner you realize that the game isn't about proofs the better. Empirical claims are not provable. Proofs are pertinent to math...

Who is talking about "correct"? You said: You can't talk about whether some definition or another is correct if you don't even have any idea what the ...

In my opinion the reason was what you said in the sentence just prior to that one: Well, people could still decide to have kids in that situation in o...

The point is, and this would have been clear had you understood all of my comment, that the information doesn't contradict. For one, when we're talkin...

Unfortunately, a lot of people think that philosophy amounts to "playing stupid." (I can explain why a lot of people misinterpret it that way.) Philos...

No, it's not hyperbole. Odds such as 1 in 292,201,338 do not mean that something can't happen. Aside from that, I'd say that what you should be skepti...

But that's what the conversation was about. That's what Sapentia was responding about, and what I responded to him about.

So you're not making any distinction between linguistic rules and physical laws?

In other words, how could something even be a rule without someone thinking about it as such? How do rules apply without mentality involved? Explain h...

How would they not still depend on minds? At best, sans minds, we're talking about something like a set of marks on a piece of paper or a computer scr...

Often when someone says something like that I just think that it's not worth bothering to even attempt communication with them. It always strikes me a...

Well, first it's important to remember that direct realism doesn't claim that there are no illusions, or that there is no faulty perception. But aside...